Club 3D Ships XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra Graphics Cards.

Club 3D, the first and yet the only add-in-board partner of XGI, announced today that the Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics cards are now shipping to leading retailers and distributors worldwide.

Announced in mid-September, the XGI Volari graphics processors are the third family of actual chips to support DirectX 9.0 capabilities available in the market. XGI currently offers two graphics processors with identical feature-set, but different performance – the Volari V5 and the Volari V8. The fundamental difference between the former and the latter is the number of rendering pipelines – 4 and 8 for the V5 and V8 respectively. The XGI Volari V5 and V8 have equal number of Vertex Shader pipelines – 2 per chip. However, the Volari V8 also packs 4 Pixel Shader pipelines, while the V5 only boasts with 2 of them.

Both V5 and V8 GPUs are made using 0.13 micron fabrication process at UMC. Following the traditions of the leading graphics chips designers, XGI initially planned to supply two speed grades for every GPU with the fastest versions coming into the market first.

Club 3D’s Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics cards are equipped with two Volari V8 processors clocked at 350MHz as well as 256MB of DDR-II SDRAM memory (GDDR-II) functioning at 800MHz. Club 3D has not declared suggested retail price for the part soon to be available in Europe.

XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics cards will be among very rare consumer graphics cards to be based on a pair of graphics processors. Previously all the plans to use two chips on single graphics card in an attempt to fight with conventional graphics cards with one GPU turned to be failure. The history knows a number of such examples – 3dfx Voodoo 2 SLI, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, Voodoo5 5500, etc. Will XGI Volari Duo prosper, or will it be entered in the list?

Discussion

actually they WEREN`T failures:
1-VooDoo 5 5500, it was going on pretty well, an dthe 6000 was coming, and after that multi-chip Rampage until nVidia did what it did.
2-RAGE Fury MAXX, till now R100,R2X0,R3X0 all of them are MAXX capable, but there wasn`t/isn`t any need for a card like that for the consumer market, where there was/is a need for it, IT EXISTS, just ask me if you wanna see a Quad R200 board, or a 6+ R300 machine.